Evolution is NOT A COMPETITION. It is essentially a collaboration between a system and its environment which includes other systems functioning within a bigger, more complex system. The surviving systems are those that are of most benefit to the dominant system. Not those that kill off other systems. For example, the human body is a system that is greatly benefited by the kidney, which is a subsystem of our body and is essential to our welfare. The human body would not benefit from a competition between the kidney and the lungs. They don’t compete; they collaborate.

Homo sapiens is in deep doodoo today (in more ways than one) because we have evolved a human social system that I refer to as the corposystem, that is in open COMPETITION with the Biosystem, rather than making ourselves essential to the welfare of the Biosystem of which we are an integral part.

Similarly as the kidney is a subsystem of us, Homo sapiens is a sub-system of the living Biosystem.

Joseph Campbell has said:

“The goal of life

is to make your heartbeat

match the beat of the universe,

to match your nature with nature.”

He is right. This is a choice for every one of us; unfortunately, most of us have chosen to align ourselves with the human corposystem (glory, fame, dominance, superiority, “leadership,” and WINNING) rather than with the universal Biosystem (wise compassion, win-win, and a vision of interacting systems working for the welfare of the whole).

As a result of our choice to compete with the Biosystem, rather than to match our nature with nature, we are now at the cutting edge of a whole set of problems, the root cause of which we refuse to acknowledge, though we know well enough the truth of it, if we were to listen to our basic science rather than to our technological prowess.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama has written:

“If you want to get rid of painful effects, you have to get rid of their causes.”

and

Wisdom is: “analyzing the facts and discerning the actual situation.”

If we want our species to survive in this world, the way to do it is to understand the facts and the realities of the system within which we are trying to survive.

I began this blog five years ago pointing out to my readers that the Biosystem is a more powerful force than the corposystem. I thought the readers would just naturally understand that it is foolhardy in the extreme to take arms against a power that is infinitely greater than one’s self. Especially when it is so very much easier to collaborate toward a win-win solution. It turns out most of my readers do not understand this fact of life — especially if they were raised in the corposystem.

I think these issues were arising in our recent retreat, but I think they arose in a form that grew out of our corposystem experiences and so were expressed in corposystem language, more than in the Language of Life. Is it perhaps our Biosystem power for which we seek? This is not what the corposystem teaches. We won’t find it in competition for resources (including jobs). We might find it in rebalancing the systems. “Male dominance?” What is that? Biosystem imbalance more likely. Not male dominance over women, but corposystem imbalance (power by domination) as a way of life that has created a whole set of problems the root cause of which we are taught to not question.

The bottom line is the same, but I would like to see it properly labeled so we can more consciously work toward the survival ethic. Women and men are more likely to benefit our communal future by growing our so-called “woman power,” which tends to consider relationships among systems, rather than by emulating the so-called “male power” that in our culture tends toward domination and destruction.

In fact, now that we have “liberated” women and other traditionally “weak” populations, by teaching them how to “think like men,” (yes an actual quote from a well-intended male peer) the women seem to be sacrificing their own powers in favor of a striving after the “male-dominant ethic” of our human corposystem that operates on the basis of forced growth to accomplish domination. If that statement sounds obtuse, please consider our corposystem method of exerting power by increasing the numbers of humans relative to the amounts of resources and re-labelling that effort as “human rights.” If one already HAS the power, then this strategy is certain to enhance one’s own power by reducing the powers of others through increase of poverty and war. And that i what we are doing.

The overall question is: Do we want to be a part of the Biosystem or do we want to be a part of the corposystem? Because the two are mutually exclusive.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com and KEOS 89.1 FM in Bryan, Texas.

We have come to an age in my country, where almost everyone we talk to is afraid of questions. It astonishes me when someone responds to my questions by bursting into tears, becoming stiff and defensive or, worse, angry over I know not what.

But wait. Come to think of it, people also ask ME questions, and yes there are times I get just a wee bit huffy about it. It does depend what kind of mood I’m in, and how I feel about the other person, and also how many times they have asked me the same question. And most of all it depends on whether I think it’s a real question or just something meant to fill the empty space between us.

Sometimes I ask dumb questions for smart reasons or sometimes smart questions for dumb reasons, and most often I ask questions that nobody knows the answers to, but different people have different answers, and if we got them all together some really exciting answers might come out of it.

I am a naturally curious person, and perhaps entering my second childhood, and I like questions because I like to understand more and more about how the world works. So I ask my questions, and what do I get?

Too often, shunned, attacked, shocked responses – too often answers that are not useful, and more importantly the person on the other end of this exchange also gets nothing useful. Or maybe it is that people will only answer the right questions, or questions that are asked correctly or appropriately.

Then you may say, as most people do say about corposystem rituals: “You are doing it the wrong way.” They don’t say the ritual is negative and causes harm to both the asker and the answerer; they say it would all turn out OK if I would do the ritual correctly – that the ritual is the ultimate right and I am wrong. And then they offer to kindly teach me how to do it right — without asking whether or not I had considered and discarded their method before they were even born.

Teeny-boppers!!!!

My answer is: “So what do I care about the corposystem rituals? The corposystem loves to tell us that we are not OK unless we can become perfect at one thing or another. It’s a great technique because nobody can do it, and at the same time these rituals keep we the people occupied and focus our attention away from serious problems we are not supposed to talk about, such as overpopulation, for example, or the corposystem take-over of our political and educational systems.

Imagine raising children and they can’t ask questions. None of us ever stop learning, and in this age of incredibly rapid change, we need answers. If we can’t ask or answer questions – well then – we are stuck in our own history, and doomed to recycle that history. And that’s a really big problem that will not be solved by anyone being perfect or not perfect.

So, as for the questions, my goal is to find answers – not to practice someone else’s proscribed format until my performance is “perfect.” And in the long run, I will end up knowing more, and knowing more is both fun and useful.

We all are stuck with each other, so maybe it would be a good time to make do, swallow our fear or pride or that little tickle in the stomach that says: “I’m not good enough; I can’t handle this,” and just answer the questions. Or tell them it’s something you don’t want to talk about. Or ask a good, relevant question back. Because in any normal social situation, questions are not really a threat to anyone. And they can be incredibly useful to us all.

And anyhow, why this need to prove that you are better than everyone else? Questions are nothing more than children learning how the world really does work, and learning the answers is not an onerous task – it’s FUN! Not only fun, but good information increases your personal power in the world.

Much better than starting wars or excluding others from important information. Or wasting our time on line trying to prove the un-provable — when we could be contributing information and attitudes that can benefit the future welfare of our communities.

Can you believe it? Here is a quote from a Taos (New Mexico) photographer, referring to the northern section of the Rio Grande river: “Watching visitors experience this sight is always entertaining. They seem to lose all sense of reality in the face of its grandeur.” Taos summer visitors guide 2014. This photographer, lives right in the middle of the grandeur, and he believes it to be – what? A movie prop?

But never mind our brainwashed young, today I absolutely planned to talk about my interaction with —let us call her Amanda—, but the following is what came out of my fingers when I sat down to type and three ideas came together in my inbox:

First – Your comment that most people cannot imagine a world without the energy of oil (see ref A below). This is true. And there are many other important things that most people can’t imagine. You can. That is why I picked your project to support, in my small way, out of the hundreds I have looked over in the past 15 years. —Amanda— can also imagine, though not yet as deeply, because she is much younger. So she is the other I support. I mean enough to stop what I’m doing and think about what y’all are doing. Of course, I have seen a number of other people with this kind of imagination, but without projects to which I could contribute usefully. Not unless they would ask the questions.

Second – I think the creation of a central dogma of imagination is one of the ways (maybe the major way) that our corposystem prevents discussion of critically important dissenting ideas (or any dissenting ideas, but now is critically important to our survival). It’s pretty much what “1984,” the book (B), is about. David, for example, used an elegant corposystem-imposed method very effectively to disempower discussion of biological reality.

I am not saying that David, or someone up there in the corposystem, is telling us not to talk or think about (something). Of course, they are to some extent, but more importantly I believe lock-step thinking is part of the biology of what maintains human systems, while outside-the-box thinking provides the variability necessary if change is to happen.

The Law of Life, generating novel systems by recombination, is how evolution brings about change, but once you get a viable combination of traits together in one system, and that system fills a niche it can feed upon, then that combination of traits is maintained essentially changeless until the system dies. To survive, the system must protect this unique combination of traits, so it does not change; rather, it becomes more and more of what it is. Whether the system be the longer and longer neck of a giraffe, or the growth fixation of the corposystem, the primary function of a system is to maintain itself.

I believe behaviors such as co-dependence are at root biological imperatives that serve similar social functions. Easier–to-recognize examples, such as the glass-half-full-syndrome

and the nice-speak syndrome (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/bare-bones-bio…156-nice-speak/) (again, see “1984”), similarly protect human systems from outside ideas. Even ideas that would prevent massive human suffering but also would, inevitably, change the system. The corposystem is not only a business plan – it is an evolved biological system that operates just as evidently out of the Law of Evolution as do physical systems.

In sum, the function of a system is to maintain itself, and that is also the simplest way to describe the Law of Evolution. I see it everywhere within our corposystem, equally as I see it in the tree of Life and the development of the whole universe. I think it is a natural law more basic than any other we have described so far.

So what do we do about this in a culture that defends itself by finding ways to not discuss the issues?

My answer is to speak as truthfully as possible (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/ factfictionfancy-130820/), trying to balance the long-term and short-term benefits to the individual, who is usually me; the culture, which is the corposystem; and the needs of the Biosystem, which we all require for our survival. At the same time I have usually tried to avoid being lynched (or crucified) for challenging the system at it’s weak links. The goal is to shake up the corposystem world view by challenging demonstrably false statements/world view (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/bare-bones-bio…3b-world-views/), so as to make it possible for people to think about the content rather than the package in which it is wrapped – to loosen a chink in our world views — while at the same time avoiding unnecessary unkindness and/or revolutionary violence, which is what will happen if the goal fails.

There is the very remote chance that humans can pull through this biological crisis because we have two unique advantages that no other species has ever had. 1) We can think, when we choose to do so. And (2) the information is available to us, whenever we decide to use it for the benefit of all sentient beings.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com and KEOS radio 89.1 in Bryan, Texas. The audio copy of this blog is available at:

I have nothing much to lose. So – that’s what I do. I have tried it both ways. To conform to the system merely empowers the system — without fundamentally changing it – because systems are flexible and can co-opt challenges, as ours has done with the charitable activities, to use the challenges to empower the system itself. Very clever. But I don’t want to empower our toxic system. As I have said from the beginning, my search is to find behaviors that will not make matters worse. And I believe that can be done only by not participating in it. That’s not possible, so one participates as little as is possible.

The greater good is compassionate honesty, with the goal in mind of reducing suffering of all sentient beings — not only us. And I think at least Tibetan Buddhism, at least the Dalai Lama, has made some fairly strong statements about wise compassion, and about education toward reality, that conform with this view. (Not the view about evolution, of course, I think he is unfortunately not well informed in this area, but about wise compassion. And he is clear that wise compassion requires education. And effort.) (D)

Writing this blog has also moved a chink in my world view. I have been thinking in the back of my mind (corpo-think) that we could “move” the corposystem toward intelligent imagination by educating the masses to understand the implications of the Law of Life. Now I’m reading of the Buddha’s wisdom as translated by a Theravaden Buddhist, with a forward by The Tibetan Buddhist. Apparently, that was one of The Buddha’s insights – that we cannot educate the masses away from their world view (because of the many ways in which a social system protects itself from change, mentioned above but he didn’t know the Law of Life). He finally concluded that every person must address this responsibility for herself, and that seems to be most of what he talked about to householders. Well, looking at the imaginations of our recent generations of well educated young householders – and the fact that more children are born every year than we can possibly influence, and immediately indoctrinated into the corposystem world view – what do you think? That’s the problem with a system. It is more powerful than an individual, even if she is right.

Last week (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/
bare-bones-biology-165-power/) I talked about some differences between “powers of the strong” and “powers of the weak.” Usually the strong try to “win” their way using the full range of aggression methods from passive-aggressive through debates and physical battle (war). Powers of the weak are not overtly aggressive and are described in the classic book of that name by Elizabeth Janeway

So what can we do who are losing the battle to grow a viable and ethical human future on this earth? We should stop thinking about aggressive fights that we can’t win, and focus on: 1) pursuing our personal mission in life, using our personal expertise or skills; and 2) working collaboratively to grow the welfare our human and biological communities. Both. Daily.

Because we do need to feel individually competent and maintain our own human values, and we cannot do this without a reasonably healthy communal environment (including welfare of the Biosystem) to live in https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/ bare-bones-biology 102 – Religion-and-science/)

As it happens, the “Greatest Generation” gave us a reasonably comfortable communal way of life. The problem is that most of us then went on to pursue our own personal values without ALSO taking responsibility for the difficult tasks that would have maintained those communities. For example, we knew then that overpopulation must be dealt with if our species is to survive; but we didn’t do enough to ensure that happened. Sooooooo complicated, I can’t cover that in 600 words, but the bottom line is that we need to work at both tasks – everyone – every day if we want to sustain human life on earth (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/) and the second task is more important in today’s culture because it is not on the agenda of our current corposystem – so then you say – again — but what can we DO?

In terms of our current human problem, what we can do and must do on a daily basis, in addition to promoting our own value system, is to RESIST participating in the toxic beliefs and practices of our failed and failing corposystem, and PERSIST in demanding rational planning for the future generations. I can think of three examples. The first, per Oren Lyons, is discussed in http://FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com/ bare-bones-biology 102 – Religion-and-science/

The second example is from the Hitler era, when “powerless” children responded by pouring sugar into gas tanks of the very powerful invaders. Their parents let them do this – not because they wanted to be heroes — but because it was the right thing to do for the community.

If enough people do it – it can happen. I would rather we do it BEFORE instead of AFTER we are conquered by the powerful special interests that now control our Corposystem. So how do we resist? The goal is to destroy the destructive power of the Corposystem, and to do it without using or promoting the Corposystem ethic.

The corposystem methods of controlling us include: (https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/ Bare Bones Biology 072 – More Corposystem Games)( https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/play-to-win/
a) defining what we may or may not discuss among ourselves (can’t discuss any core issue — growth or overpopulation or climate change); b) illegally causing harm to the land, the sea, the river systems, and the air, and even the gene pool of the whole Biosystem; c) withholding facts of various kinds; d) constantly tightening its hold over the education of the young through television, story telling, the internet, the school system (think Texas textbooks) and the legal system; e) the war ethic, promoting and rewarding and teaching competition of all kinds, rather than competence and cooperation, as the criteria for success.

What can we do? We can (figuratively) pour sugar onto the power of that system.

For example: a) most important, discuss or at least mention the core issues that are destroying our place in the Biosystem. Daily; (b) teach, learn and practice critical thinking skills, BOTH scientific thinking AND philosophical thinking; b) don’t compete; rather collaborate in fact-based discussion of solutions; c) honor and protect our rule of law, an example of an activity where you CAN be aggressive but don’t follow the corposystem rules; d) do not promote or participate in opinion-based propaganda or malicious gossip.

That’s what we can do; anyone can do it; and that’s enough if we would do it.

We cannot fight and win over a superior power, but the superior-power aggression methods don’t work anyhow. They never have. All they do is recycle the toxic sorts of human power trips. And there is no human power trip that can defeat the superior power of the Biosystem. The Biosystem response will be to quietly and passively CHANGE until it reaches a new kind of balance that does not include humans. That’s what WE can do that will work to change the future rather than to just repeat the victim/perp cycle over and over again. The time has come that we can grow a new kind of human social system that is based in achieving a human-friendly balance of power among ourselves and between ourselves and the Bosystem.
But we cannot do this without reducing the human population because there is no longer enough food to just wait around until we get it right; it would be better if we reduce the population in human-friendly ways, rather than wait for Armageddon. The only way to do THAT is to discuss the issue among ourselves. Frankly, I think that is the lesson that God is waiting for us to learn.

“Much of what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount,” Gandhi said in a famous lecture to the YMCA in Ceylon in 1927. Though that still rings true, he helped Christians around the world reclaim the nonviolence of Jesus, and reminded us of the central importance of the Sermon on the Mount.http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/gandhis-daily-scripture-readings-peace

Right from the beginning, my blog has been about power, particularly it is about personal power – our power to build our lives around our own positive values. Of course we can’t do anything or everything that we want to do. Other powers exist that we do not personally control. The power of communities; the power of the corposystem; and most importantly for our survival, the power of the ecosystem. We can not directly control these other things, at least we can’t control how they respond to our mutual environment, and it’s better that we don’t try.

It is better to clearly understand the powers that we are able to control, rather than to stand around comparing notes about what we can not do. Or to cry and complain because we can’t have everything we want. It’s given away, that crying time. We could have used that time to grow our own personal power. When we spend time complaining about the corposystem, whether we hate it or fear it, all that time we are complaining about the corposystem we are actually growing the power of the corposystem, and they count on that help. They nurture it. They want us to believe they can control us. But it’s only true at level three. In the important ways, they can not control us at the level of personal power. Not unless we believe in the corposystem more than we believe in ourselves.

I have spoken often about levels of organization, including levels of power. I am not the ecosystem (level four in my system of categorizing). I am not the corposystem (level three). I am not the community (level two). But I am me, level one, and my personal power is my own to claim and use for the benefit of myself or of humankind or for whatever I choose to use it. I can give it away, but nobody can take it away from me. It lives in the choices that I make right now. Every breath, every millisecond of life, contains a choice – what to do – and whether I think about it or not, whether I believe it or not, what I do with the choice of this moment, including doing nothing, is my personal power (or my weakness). If I choose to spend this moment moaning over the negative power of the corposystem, then I am growing a future, for myself and for other people, that will be one long moan.

The Peach Clubhouse exists because I could not find enough expressions of personal power in the other places where I looked for them, including some educational and progressive groups. What I found instead was a lock-step re-affirmation of the power of the corposystem to rule our lives unhampered.

That’s hogwash.

But it’s easy to understand.

Because it’s hard to see around our training.

For example, I came THIS close to making the Peach Clubhouse into a nonprofit organization, before I realized what that means. The nonprofits are the scavengers of the corposystem. They’re part of the corposystem. Like a buzzard or a maggot, they support the corposystem by cleaning up after it, cleaning up the harm that it causes. And more importantly they support the corposystem mantra. Success is growth – selling, fighting, growing.

Well, damn, selling, fighting and growing only creates more messes, and it defines the nonprofits by the same toxic charter that defines the corposystem. Were I to buy into this system, I would betray the whole purpose of the Peach Clubhouse — this emblem of my personal power — by allowing it to be swallowed up into the corposystem, defined by the greed, fear and hatred of the corposystem. As our media, and our rule of law, have been swallowed up, and even – you can believe this or not – the corposystem evidently thinks it can swallow up the ecosystem. Well that won’t happen, because none of us can live without the ecosystem. And neither will I throw the Peach Clubhouse into that black hole.

For me, the concept of emergent properties (Bare Bones Biology 017, FactFictionFancy-How Can we Know so Little, is critical to understanding our human power inside our living and nonliving environment. And this is important because any living thing needs to understand power relationships to stay alive. How much personal power do I have? How much power is attributable to God? Or to the Ecosystem? These relationships are very fundamental, and if we mis-interpret them we may end up on our keesters. Or extinct. Or just miserable wanting our world to be something it can not be.

If we truly understand the reality of emergent properties — that is, if we appreciate the fact that all of our physical reality is the result of a complex combination of factors — causes and effects — then there is no such thing as a winner. Or even a hero.

Ho, indeed, big jump there, but how can there be a winner if the individual who won was not individually responsible for the win? For example, I once won. I won a court case. I can give you a list as long as your arm of conditions and people and coincidences without which I would not have won, no matter how good the cause and no matter how diligently and skillfully I worked.

I noticed this disconnect in our thinking, between the concept of winner and the reality of complexity, while struggling to make sense of our American idea that “everyone can be a winner,” that I saw on a schoolroom wall. I have been one, and I don’t think so. Or maybe someone has changed the meaning of the word – winner. As I understand American English, a winner is someone who won something by using her own power or skill. In order to win something, the winner has to beat something. Usually what she beats is other people. Just look around. I think there must be at least ten or fifteen losers produced in our culture for every winner. How can we believe that everyone can be a winner with something like 1/5 of our population under the poverty line? That can’t be winning, and I don’t think anyone is actually counting the losers. A lot of losers are over the poverty line – way over the poverty line.

During my lifetime this tendency in our culture has increased dramatically, as has our delight in blaming each other for whatever happens that we don’t like. We shout the praises of the winners, and blame the losers for their losses, because we believe we all are personally in control of own wins and losses. It’s not true. Every win reflects a complex history of interactions, most of which we don’t personally control. And so does every loss.

If you want an example of the absurd extremes this can reach – just look at the Congress of today where everyone is assuming his own omniscience, and is busy blaming everyone else, and nobody is willing to work toward the solution itself, because it is really complicated and would require cooperation among the millions of parts that must fall into place in the right way to reach an emergent solution.

Interestingly, this morning news reported that the imprisoned sons of Mubarac are unable to comprehend what it means not to have a cell phone in jail, so the reporter said. I guess they thought their power was an innate and immutable part of their personal makeup — stronger even than the laws of nature. It’s not. The only power we really have is our good luck plus our understanding of the merging facts and processes, and the probable consequences of the choices we make. The very most that we can ever accomplish is to focus the threads of cause and effect toward a goal. We have everything we need right now to align our human presence with the physical realities of the world we live in — except we don’t have the will to define our common goal and then go for it.

1. You can’t build anything positive by fighting against anything.
That is what Ghandi and the Dalai Lama and Karen Armstrong, and a number of other people are trying to get us to hear.

This is clear in all religions. Dhamapadha translated by Eknath Easwaran (I changed love and I changed hate because I have figured out that at least the Buddhists I know don’t understand what these words mean, relative to what the texts teach:

“For hostility can never put an end to hostility;
Only compassion can; this is an unalterable law.”

And the Bible — Faith Hope and Charity (changed later to love), what is the greatest of these?

2. That was the mistake of the Obama supporters. They assumed that we could “change” our culture by fighting for change.

Fighting can not change our culture because the basic root of our culture IS fighting. Unless we can change that basic root, there is no point getting all het up about wars to end all war, war against (whatever you don’t want).

3. Indeed, the corposystem is built on the worst of our human values — however — it is a terrible mistake to try to destroy the corposystem as an act of hostility.

a. The result will be dreadful suffering of the innocent; these young hero wannabes have no idea what will happen if the corposystem suddenly collapses — or possibly they WANT chaos and armageddon. Quite a few people do. like Bush2 and Osama, two of a kind, had apparently that same goal in their heads. I do not chose fighting as my heritage. If that is what I wanted — I already have it and I would be out there fighting, rather than sitting here trying to grow something positive.

b. The corposystem is going to crash all of its own accord anyway. There is no way a construct based on infinite growth can survive anyhow, so that strikes me as just another excuse to find something to fight about. Or they are so brainwashed by the system — that’s how systems
perpetuate themselves. They raise up people who can’t think of any other way to accomplish something than to do the thing they cry out against. They know something is wrong, but they don’t know anything else.

(That’s how I won my case, in part. People in power can only think of one thing. You can carry on
behind their backs and they never notice it because they don’t view it as power. The only kind of power that exists for them is the one kind of power that they understand.) That’s why my blog is about POWER to succeed.

Not power to destroy.

The only way we can change the corposystem is to save the rule of law and change it. If we the people don’t want to do that, then we can. If we can’t, then we can’t, and we should not be wasting our energy trying to do something negative that we can’t do when we can do something that will bring positive change to the future. It’s part of succeeding to not try to do something you can’t do. Now my guess is that the people who are promoting hostility ARE succeeding at THEIR goal. Which is to be heroes. I don’t care whether or not they get to be heroes, and if I waste my time trying to help them to be heroes, I am not contributing to a more positive future.

We have only one arena of power, and that is to the future. We are now on a knife-edge balance and I don’t have any idea which way it will go, but I know what side I’m putting my weight on. We can either grow a future of violence or grow some changes. Given that we are not yet suffering physically, that means we have all the more obligation to evaluate all our behaviors according to the facts on the ground (not according to what we WANT) and whether our actions arelikely to cause more suffering in the future or less suffering in the future. As the suffering is coming in any case, I believe we have a major responsibility to the future to address right now the behaviors that are and will cause more suffering in the future.

Fighting anything will only make matters worse in the future. We can’t stop the fighting unless we grow a world that is not overpopulated, but we don’t have to make up things to fight about that are also consuming more of the resources that the earth has not enough of.

As for low-energy lightbulbs — that sort of thing is a feelgood boondoggle. We don’t have to fall for all that. The main thing it does is sell lightbulbs. When I have one that burns out I’ll replace it with a better one, but that won’t solve anything. When there are more people on the earth than the resources of the earth — no matter what you buy or do is using resources and therefore is harmful in some way. To believe otherwise is exactly what the corposystem wants you to do. We can not compensate for overpopulation or corporate overgrowth by making more things to sell; we can’t compensate for it by fighting anything. The corposystem is making most of its money already by generating fights and responding to disasters that wouldn’t be disasters if we had enough land to fit all the people in reasonable healthy places. Running around fighting will only feed their maw and nourish our egos, when our best contribution would be to stay home and help to grow a positive and compassionate lifestyle for the future of the ecosystem.